OK, I admit it, I'm not a teacher. I'm a computer programmer. But I am a person. And I did go to school once. And I have two daughters at secondary school. And twin boys aged five months, who hopefully will go to school one day too. So I am not totally unqualified to comment.
Even though I've already shown an alarming tendency to start sentences with a conjunction.
Like most parents, I get as much information from my teenagers about school life in 2007 as I get about Digital TV from the average sales assistant in an electrical goods retail store. So I wondered if the popular teaching technique of Ritual Humiliation still exists?
In my day, at a grammar school in the 1970s, any blatant displays of stupidity, indecisiveness, disorganisation or simple absentmindedness were fair game for the teachers.
One unfortunate individual submitted an essay about a typhoon. The literary content may have been superb, but this hapless youth managed to spell "typhoon" without the "h", both in the title and throughout his work. This was naturally exploited by our English teacher who, being a superb orator, read the entire essay out loud to the rest of the class, stressing each misspelled "tyPOON" to maximum comic effect. While the rest of us fell off of our chairs in mirth, I suspect the author of the piece found the performance slightly less amusing.
Our German teacher, a small but terrifying flame-haired Ulsterman, was an absolute master of the "no-win" situation. "Right", he would say introducing the next subject. "This will separate the sheep from the goats". Then after a pause just long enough to instil some unease in the class, he would look up and say "Perkin! Are you a sheep or a goat?". What could I say? "Sheep" or "goat" would no doubt both have illicited a mocking "Baaaah!", so I chose the time-honoured reaction of silence. "Are you not well, Perkin?", he asked. "Yes Sir." "Yes you are, or yes you're not?" You couldn't win.
In another classic vignette, a boy arrived at a German class about fifteen minutes late. He shuffled to the teacher's desk and gave his apology, and the perfectly valid reason for his tardy arrival. He then just stood there, as one would, waiting for a dismissal, or a response of some sort. The teacher said nothing, but just stared at the latecomer for what must have seemed like an eternity. After leaving the poor boy in limbo until he'd just about started to squirm, he said,"What are you waiting for, a round of applause? Sit down!".
I'm sure there were many other similar events, and if I remember them, I may post them at another time. For now, I am just wondering if these classic techniques are still in use. Maybe it's just too politically incorrect to subject the poor darlings to this sort of character-building experience. That's a shame, because although the examples given may be seen as simply having a joke at the pupils' expense, the same techniques were effectively used for discipline and general "crowd control".
We had our share of weaker teachers too, and they were quite often taken apart by the more rumbunctious pupils, so lack of control in the classroom is obviously not a new phenomenon. However, many of my teachers had immense "presence", and they garnered instant respect, often by dint of their reputation preceding them. In time though, they reciprocated this respect, so by the end of your school career, a strong teacher/pupil relationship existed.
I don't see any reason why the teachers from my school would not enjoy the same levels of respect these days. They didn't maintain control and respect by threatening miscreants with corporal punishment, or detention, or letters to home, or ASBOs. They simply had the strength of character and the wit to be able to humiliate pupils in front of their peers, which I'm sure would be just as effective today as it was thirty years ago.
It didn't do anyone any long-term harm as far as I know. These days every other school-age child seems to be suffering from depression, or has regular appointments with the psychiatrist. I'm sure we were all OK. Or maybe it's just that our parents couldn't afford to send us to the shrink.
